Genealogy As Activism Uncovers Black History

Members of a Woodbury, New Jersey family had not a clue that their direct ancestor was a soldier in the storied 29^th Connecticut Colored Regiment in the Civil War. Or that he had written an important account of his life. Or that his remains lie beneath a paved-over, segregated burial ground, now a parking lot not a block from where they live.

Now, thanks to the genealogical activism of independent scholar John Mills and his Alex Breanne Corporation, they do.

The Alex Breanne Corporation is a nonprofit dedicated to researching the lives not of the famous, but of ordinary enslaved African Americans. With that history-come-life in his hands, Mills tries to re-inject the lost past into the present through providing often full-scale genealogical portraits to families; subsidizing restoration of tombstones and other markers; campaigning for street name changes; and helping create murals, to name a few.

Mills described his genealogical labors of love, which he likened to a form of activism, to a rapt audience at the Yale University Sterling Library lecture hall Wednesday afternoon.

He currently has 23 case histories of ordinary people in play — ordinary, yet often, when the facts are assembled, extraordinary tales of perseverance and courage. These case histories include several soldiers from the Civil War regiments raised in Connecticut following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

The program, in honor of National Military Appreciation Month, was sponsored by Yale’s Working Women’s Network, the Yale African-American Affinity Group, and the Yale Veterans’ Network, and drew 20 people in person and more than 50 online.

In an hour-long talk by turns personal, passionate, and full of the larger historical context, Mills reported that every new detail of his own lineage, triggered by his sister’s interest in genealogy, was both eye-opening and personally empowering.

Those details included, for example, how his last name derived from that of an enslaver in 1830s Texas and how the family ultimately migrated to California, where Mills grew up in San Diego.

“Every time I learned another piece of information, I literally felt my shoulders grow straighter, with pride,” he said.

Replicating that experience for others now often takes Mills not only to libraries and archives but to the remains of segregated cemeteries grown over or long gone and ignored for decades. 

Just to be there, he said, to walk the area and sense the ancestors and their perseverance and courage is both inspiring and, he added, ​“spiritual.”

“The more I learn of these stories” –- he was speaking specifically of Isaac J. Hill and Alexander Newton, among the veterans he has researched from the 29^th, 30^th, and 31^st Colored Regiments — ​“the greater my reverence. They volunteered, they were paid less, and on the battlefield, if wounded, they were treated worse, or ignored.”

Mills discovered in Hill’s memoir, for example, statements of personal hurt and indignation that just as the 1,400 troops of the regiments were returning to Connecticut from their service at Vicksburg and other battles, the state legislature voted not to allow African Americans the franchise.

It would take Connecticut until 1870 to ratify the 15^th Amendment and alter its own constitution that until then retained a ​“white men only” qualification for voting.

Mills also discovered early versions of the modern Black Power raised fist symbol or the taking of a knee in collective protest in Hill’s description, for example, of a protest Hill’s unit mounted.

It occurred in Annapolis, Maryland, on their way to deployment when the promised payment for enlistment for white troops had arrived, but not for the Black soldiers.

So, during a ceremony in Annapolis, Hill wrote, his unit ​“did not acknowledge the flag.”

A software engineer in his day job, Mills supports most of the activities of his organization out of his own pocket and from speaking fees.

Upcoming events include a ceremony for a restored burial plaque for Isaac Hill in New Jersey and a similar restoration of the burial stone of Mary Newton. She’s the mother of Alexander Newton, who also served in the 29^th Connecticut Colored Regiment, and is buried in Evergreen Cemetery.

A free Black woman, she moved to New Haven from North Carolina in 1859 to raise money to free her husband Thaddeus and others. Mary pushed a wash cart washing the clothes of soldiers-in-training at Grape Vine Point, now Criscuolo Park in Fair Haven, near where a monument stands for where those soldiers trained and then shipped out.

Mary Newton, Mills reported, went on to become a distinguished homeopathic doctor in New Haven. Her life and that of her son Alexander, also a memoirist of his service in the colored regiments, will be celebrated, through the unveiling of her restored tombstone, on June 21, at 11:00 a.m. at Evergreen Cemetery.

Click here for info on that event and here to see the full deck of historical images presented in Mills’ talk. And here to learn more about the Alex Breanne Corporation.